contradictory information, and who re-
ally want nothing more than for their
children to be healthy and safe. Vacci-
nation has been the victim of its own
success. Eradication has afforded these
parents the luxury of equivocation. Peo-
ple have forgotten how dangerous these
diseases were and, in the absence of re-
minders, have become complacent, giv-
ing in to what one doctor called “im-
munological amnesia.”
An outbreak is a fine bracer. Public-
health officials have seized on this one
as an occasion both to reach out to the
hesitant and to reconsider their tactics
of persuasion: the dreary work of win-
ning hearts and minds. Patricia Rup-
pert, the Rockland County health com-
missioner, told me, of the vaccine-hesitant
mothers she’d encountered, “They’re
not as interested in the science as they
are in the stories.”
At Mount Sinai Hospital one day in
June, during Zucker’s grand rounds there,
Chanie Sternberg and Corinna Manini,
the chief medical officer at Refuah, gave
a presentation to an auditorium of phy-
sicians about the so-called motivational-
interview technique, a less combative
and less condescending way of fielding
patients’ concerns and presenting the
justifications for vaccines. Don’t over-
whelm them with data. Address their
stated concerns, one at a time. “I strongly
recommend” rather than “You’d be stu-
pid not to.” Have the recommendation
gently reiterated by everyone along the
way: receptionists, nurses, pharmacists,
home-care workers. “Drop the pam-
phlets,” Sternberg said. Common sense
helps. When a mother protests that her
child has a cold and that the vaccine
shot might just make things worse, Stern-
berg says, “The baby’s cranky anyway, so
you might as well get it over with.”
It was Sternberg who, early on, helped
connect Zucker and his department to
the rabbinical leaders in Rockland County,
to smooth the exchange of information
and promote the vaccination drive. Sev-
eral times during the fall, Zucker met
with the rabbis, in groups of thirty to
forty. Obviously, though, they weren’t
the ones taking the kids to the doctor.
“My cousins lived up there for a while,”
Zucker said. “I asked them, ‘What should
we do?’ They said, ‘Talk to the moms.’
At the end of the day, the moms don’t
want their kids to get sick.”T
he Refuah Health Center is just
down the road from the Ateres
Charna Wedding Hall, not far from
the Palisades Parkway. The center was
founded three decades ago, after Gover-
nor Mario Cuomo urged the local gran-
dees to find a way to provide health
services for the burgeoning Orthodoxpopulation. (New Square, it should be
noted, votes almost entirely as a bloc;
Hillary Clinton got more than ninety-five
per cent of the vote there in her Senate
races and in 2016. It should also be noted
that, in 2001, Bill Clinton commuted the
sentences of four New Square men who
had been convicted of defrauding the
government in a fake-yeshiva scheme.)
“When I joined Refuah, it was just a
concept, a pile of papers, an application
for a license,” Chanie Sternberg said.
When Refuah opened, in 1993, it ex-
pected fifteen thousand visits per year.
The number, in year one, was twice that,
and this year it will top three hundred
thousand. It began as a primary-care fa-
cility, but it’s now four stories high and
delivers a wide array of services, includ-
ing optometry, dentistry, and gynecol-
ogy. Refuah is a nonprofit operation, de-
spite a rumor I heard, in Monsey, that it
was pushing vaccines in order to make
money. Of the twenty-seven thousand
M.M.R. vaccines that have been admin-
istered in Rockland County since Oc-
tober 1st, six thousand have been deliv-
ered by Refuah. One of them was mine.
I was born after the first measles vaccine
was developed, in 1963, but before the
two-shot protocol came along, in 1989.
(Now children typically get the first shot
around the age of one and the second
around age four.) So it’s possible that I
had been undervaccinated, all these years.
While I was talking to Sternberg, a nurse
came in and gave me a booster.
Sternberg was born in 1964, in the
wake of an infamous epidemic of rubella,
or German measles. “My mother told me
stories about it, about staying home for
nine months while she was pregnant with
me,” she said. “A lot of my classmates had
hearing loss.” She grew up in Borough
Park, Brooklyn (her father, from Czecho-
slovakia, had been a follower of the elder
Twersky), and after she and Yitzchok
were married, in 1984, they moved to
Lakewood, New Jersey, and then to Mon-
sey, in 1988. Before coming to Refuah,
she’d worked at Nyack Hospital, in the
medical-records department. Like most
Orthodox wives, she wears a black wig
and modest dark clothing, but something
about her quick, quiet way of stating
things put me in mind of Nora Charles.
Nearly twenty per cent of the pop-
ulation of New Square is under the
age of five, a cohort that is especially